This Ship Has Sailed… Without Us
In a previous blog from March, I wrote:
So back to that question… Now what? Here are some of the dreams we are working on:
This month, we are flying one-way to New Zealand and boarding a 6 week cruise taking us to Austrailia, the South Pacific, and Hawaii, ending in Vancouver, British Columbia (watch this blog space for updates, photos and stories!).
Devastatingly, that ship — that dream — has sailed without us.
So much longing, so much anticipation. Planning, scheming, booking, saving, packing — it all came crashing down the day our flight left for New Zealand. Lois had already gone to bed on the eve of our trip, and I was up a bit longer to double check our many lists and do some last minute packing. Finally, with the last of the ducks put in a row, I entered our room for some much needed shut-eye (wondering if sleep was even possible given our pending trip of a lifetime). But as I came into the room, I unexpectedly found Lois sitting at the side of our bed looking horrible. In an instant, I knew something terrible was going on. I quickly checked her vitals and they validated my worst fear — Lois needed to get to the hospital ASAP. This was soon followed by questions verbalized by both of us… Why this? Why now? Is there a quick solution? Do we really need to go to the hospital? Is our cruise sunk?
So rushing to the car, we sped off to ER. As each minute passed, symptoms worsened. During triage at ER, Lois was in a serious state of confusion and nearly crashed to the ground. That one act got us a golden ticket straight into the trauma center where a team of eight sprung into action. In spite of the horror and frenzy of the moment, somehow I held a glimmer of hope that we could get through this emergency and back to our trip. Knowing Lois like I do, I was quickly connecting a few medical dots, bringing the lead doctor up to speed. Surely the root cause was a medicinal interaction issue of some sort. A quick antidote, a few hours recovery and soon we’ll be on our way. After all, it was still only 2:00 am, and our plane wasn’t leaving until midnight that same day. Yes, it could happen.
But it didn’t happen.
What came instead was many tests, much monitoring, and lots of waiting for results. The ER team was doing exactly what they were supposed to do — methodically ruling out many potentially grim diagnoses, one after another after another. And so we waited…
4:00 am — “One or two more hours and we will be on our way.”
5:00 am — “Why is the hospital moving so slow?”
6:00 am — “Lois, this trip might not happen.”
But more important than anything else, care and concern was rightly focused on Lois. And then, as we continued to wait for results, and the clock neared 7:00 am, reality set in for both of us. Lois was still suffering without much improvement. The Pacific cruise was over. Mid morning, Lois was finally released.
So what was the final diagnosis? Severe complications due to medicinal interactions. Nothing grave, but even so it was a very traumatic health event for Lois. It took most of 3 months of recovery before she returned to her normal baseline of health.
But on the positive side, we were able to redeem some of our lost vacation time with a beautiful, relaxing trip to the California Mendocino coast (see photos below).
As for our lost dream of a world-wide cruise, perhaps Lois and I will try it again down the road. To be perfectly honest, we are over it and ready to move on. As we shared before, “Someday is Today”, and we are full of ideas for fun and adventure this coming year. More about that in our next blog.
